American Idol – Saved!

After wondering for the past five weeks how this Save of the judges was going to work and who they would deem worthy, we had our answer tonight. Matt Giraud was worthy of being saved. At the beginning of the finals, I thought he would be saved easily, but the past few weeks, I wasn’t so sure if the judges would feel that way anymore.

Matt has some versatility in that he can sing both R&B and rock, but the judges never liked him singing rock. Personally, I always like him every week, not necessarily my favorite every week, but I always like him. And downloading the songs off iTunes (see the link at the right), on the weeks where the songs don’t seem to work so well live, they always do when recorded.

Yet, my personal feelings aside, Matt still ended up in the bottom tonight with Anoop Desai and Lil Rounds. Once Anoop was saved, and it was just Lil and Matt together on those weirdly-shaped stools, Simon indicated there was one person he would consider saving, and that person would be surprised. I figured the biggest surprise to be saved would be Lil after not just her performance the night before, but the words she exchanged with Simon after her critique. I thought at this point if Matt was in the bottom two, he was a goner.

It was fate that saved Lil and not the judges, leaving Matt to sing for his life and survival on the show. I liked the majority of his performance except where he tried to rock it out the night before, but tonight his voice was wavering, assumably as he was reading between the lines just as I was, yet he left out the part of the song he knew didn’t go over well with the judges. He was listening, something that Lil is still failing to do, other than when they told her to go back and sit down.

The judges weren’t deliberating here really at all, as Kara DioGuardi and Paula Abdul danced along, similar to when Megan Joy performed for the last time and she wasn’t being considered for a Save because of her comment that she didn’t care what Simon thought of her performance. I thought it was written in stone and we were seeing the last Matt performance until he returns with some R&B superstar at the finals.

Simon started out telling him he thought he sang worse than the night before and that he didn’t have a chance to win, and when I was getting ready to say goodbye to a favorite American Idol performer for the second time on a birthday of my son’s (five years ago Jon Peter-Lewis was voted out, singing a spirited Jailhouse Rock on his way out), Simon smiled and said it was good news. He followed this by saying there was also bad news, as now two people will go home next week, and it’s also disco week.

Well yes, that is bad news, on both accounts.

Afterwards, the more I thought about the judges using the Save right now, the more it made sense. Did you see the drama right after Matt was saved? All the Idols, a crew that is decidedly closer than most years, that had been sitting on the couches came running over jumping on him and hugging him. I had to play it back at least a half dozen times. It was so fun to watch! In addition, the judges could only use the save for one or two more possible weeks anyway, depending on how you read the Fox wording “up until final 5.” Does that mean they can use it on final 5 week or no? To not use it this week, they might be presented with someone they don’t want to save next week, and would never get to have that excitement on the show.

Ryan Seacrest can stand up there all he wants and announce that they put the Save into effectt his season to help save certain performers like Chris Daughtry, Jennifer Hudson, and Michael Johns, but in effect it seems they put it there to increase the excitement of the results. We’ve been talking for weeks about who they’d use it on and when, and now when they finally used it, it’s only opening it up to more excitement.